A Song for Julia (19 page)

Honestly, it was a fun little party. Everybody laughed and joked. Even Sean joined in, awkwardly telling a story from the manga he was reading, which convinced me I’d made a good choice in gifts. 

Every once in a while, I’d look over at Jack and Margot, fascinated. They were in their early fifties, I guess, but from the way they kept touching each other, you’d think they were teenagers. He kept a hand on her knee, and sometimes she’d reach up and touch his hair or his shoulder. They stayed close, very close. I couldn’t help but draw a comparison to my own parents, who were distant, sat at opposite ends of the table, and rarely touched or even smiled at each other.

In some ways, the party reminded me of my own seventeenth birthday. The last time I had one with my family before everything completely fell apart. My birthday falls three days after Christmas, which used to make December the best month of the year, and now makes it the worst. But my seventeenth? It wasn’t bad.

For one thing, school was out. Lana, my best friend, came over, and we spent Friday night watching bootleg first run movies from the States, eating chocolate, and laughing. Lana’s parents were Australian diplomats, and we used to spend a lot of time joking with each other about the differences in our countries, in the way we talked. Not so different from Jack and Tony, though somehow I couldn’t imagine them stabbing each other in the back and ruining each other’s lives.

I shivered. It took me a long time to reconstruct my life, secretly, after what Harry did to me. Lana had been there. She knew how hard it was. She knew how delicate it was. And when the time came, it seemed like nothing at all for her to sweep the rug out from under me and bring my life crashing back down again.

I struggled to bring myself mentally back to the present. I didn’t think anyone really noticed, until I saw Crank looking at me strangely. I spread my arms and raised my eyebrows as if to say, “What?” and he looked away.

The one elephant in the room that no one mentioned was Sean’s reaction to his mother. Or rather, lack of reaction. Through the night so far, he’d not responded to her at all. Not one word. And I could see it was slowly killing her inside. Even when she smiled or laughed, I could see the sadness in her eyes. Profound sadness. 

Finally we got to the gifts. Crank had gotten him a couple of video games, and his dad bought him more comics. Tony and Mrs. Doyle both brought accessories for electronics kits. From the way he set them aside, I got the feeling that was an interest that had passed its time. His eyes opened wide when he opened my gift: a figurine of a character in the manga I’d seen him reading.

“Is that Rei Ayanami?” he asked.

Jack and Margot both looked puzzled.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Why her?” he asked.

“Um … well … because she’s a little different and isolated. But also a hero. And even though she starts out very isolated, she comes out of her shell. Which is something I’m trying to learn how to do.”

He put the figurine in his pocket and looked relatively close to me, like somewhere over my shoulder, and said, in a very formal tone of voice, “Thank you very much.”

I swallowed and took a deep breath. Somehow that moment meant a lot to me. And that’s when I realized that everyone in the room was staring at me. Crank, in particular, gave me such an intense look it made me shiver. I couldn’t tell if it was love or hate, but whatever it was, it was scary.

Jack passed over a small box. “And this is from your mother.”

Sean reached out and took it in his hand and slowly weighed it. Then, without a word, he set it to the side. Without unwrapping it.

“Sean,” Jack said.

“I don’t want it.”

Margot looked as if she’d been punched in the gut. She said, “It’s all right …” but you could tell from her face that it wasn’t. It wasn’t all right at all, and my heart was breaking for her. I just wish I understood what was going on, what had happened to cause this deep rift between her and her children.

“It’s not all right,” Jack blurted out. “Sean, open your mother’s present.”

“No, really, Jack,” Margot said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“Sean,” Jack said in a firm, almost threatening voice. He was turned halfway toward Sean, almost shielding Margot from her own son. Protective, and fierce, and very angry. My stomach twisted.

Sean looked up and off to the side. “She’s just leaving again. I do not want her present.”

A tear ran down Margot’s face, and then another, and then she started shaking.

The rest of us were a frozen tableau, no one knowing how to react, when Jack stood up and walked toward Sean. “Sean, open your mother’s present. She came all this way to bring you a gift, and you’re hurting her feelings.”

Sean stood up and faced his father and with hands clenched into fists at his side, he shouted, “Good! I hope I hurt them! I did not ask her to come here today! Why did you have to bring her here and ruin my birthday?”

Mrs. Doyle shook her head and put a hand on Margot’s trembling shoulder, and Jack shouted, “Go to your room, Sean!”

“Good!” Sean shouted. “Now it’s just like always!” And he reached down and picked up the gift, and threw it, hard, at the front window. Whatever was in the gift was hard, but the wrapping softened the blow a little bit. It hit the window with a loud whack, but the window didn’t crack.

Jack surged forward, and Crank jumped up, physically putting himself in between them. “Dad, calm down,” he shouted. 

Sean’s face was marked with rage, eyebrows drawn down low and pushed together, and he moved toward his father. “What, were you going to attack me?”

“Sean!” Crank shouted, putting his other hand against Sean’s chest to hold him back. “Chill out. Everybody chill out!”

The room went silent, except for Margot’s tortuous, stifled sobs. Sean stalked off and then broke into a run in the hallway, his sneakers thumping on the stairs on his way up.

Jack deflated, exhaling suddenly. With sinking shoulders, he said, “Oh, shit. I’m sorry, Margot. I’m so sorry.”

Nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention to me. So I quietly got to my feet, stepped out of the room, and tiptoed upstairs.

Don’t Get in the Way (Crank)

As always after a blowup with Sean, my heart was pounding, and my stomach was twisted in knots. For the first time in a very long time, I felt a huge wave of sympathy for my mother. Seeing her like this now—broken, silently weeping—brought back memories I’d have just as soon not remembered. 

My mother, sitting there at the same couch with my father’s arms wrapped around her, wailing, “I just want to die! Please let me die!”

I squeezed my eyes to shut out the memory, but it wouldn’t go. That was five or so years ago, right before she left, right before I left. 

Jack put his arms around her. He spoke gently, “Let’s go sit in the kitchen, get you some coffee or something.”

She nodded, and Tony put a hand on her shoulder in sympathy. Mrs. Doyle got up to go, and I walked her to the door, and said, very quietly, “I’m sorry about that blowup, Mrs. Doyle.”

She looked at me with level eyes. Sad eyes. “You just take care of your mom and your brother, young man. You’ve all been through a lot, but it will get better.”

I wish I had her confidence. Sometimes I worried so much about Sean and his blowups. I’d been a bad kid, sure. But I never got so angry that I confronted Dad like that, except once, and he’d clocked me right in the face when it happened. Now, with Sean, it happened weekly around here and was getting worse. That was one of the reasons I was at the house so much. To give them some space from each other, to be a buffer. 

My mom and dad and Tony moved into the kitchen, and that’s when I realized … Julia had gone missing.

I checked out the back door, but she wasn’t there, and the ground floor bathroom was open. So I quietly went up the stairs.

Sean’s door was cracked, light streaming across the floor in the hallway. As I approached, I could hear him pacing back and forth, which he always did when he was pent up with energy. He was talking, a slightly disjointed and toneless monologue which occasionally broke into angry tones. 

“Why should I accept her gift? Or have her in the house? She left when I was twelve. She is not part of my life. She did not want to be part of my life. Why should she be part of my life now, when it is convenient for her?”

Julia was in there. She said something, but it was quiet. I couldn’t really hear, so I moved closer. As I did so, I saw her. She was sitting on the floor next to his bed, knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs. He was pacing in circles.

“I know,” he responded to whatever she said.

He stopped pacing, suddenly, and asked, “Why don’t you get along with your mother?”

I held my breath. She must have said something to him before I came up here.

She took a deep breath and replied, “A few things, I guess. You know we lived in China most of my high school years? My parents … they went through a rough time for a while, especially the first two years. And I … I went through the worst experience in my life, and needed help, and didn’t get it from her. Later on, when things got really bad after we came back to the States, it was like she judged me, you know? She didn’t take the time to find out my side of the story, or listen, or be … a mom. Instead it was all about controlling me and sometimes saying things that made me feel bad about myself. Really bad. All the while, I was protecting her.”

Sean started pacing again. This was his way of working out his energy, but sometimes it had the opposite effect, winding him up even more. I wasn’t sure what was happening here, because this was as real a conversation as I’d ever heard him have. He never talked about this stuff with us, that was for sure.

“My mom used to cry at night,” he said. “All the time. I could hear her down the hall, and sometimes when she was crying, it was about me. Like I was a broken toy, and she wanted to return me to the store. Or get me fixed. Every day it was another doctor, and she would tell them all about what was wrong with me.”

She looked up at him, her hair falling away from her face. “That must have been really hard.”

“I want … I—” He couldn’t continue the sentence.

“You want your mother to love you the way you are?”

“Yes!” he cried out. And the damnedest thing was, I could hear the sadness, the emotion in his voice. My brother, who was always, always monotone, unless he was angry. “Why won’t she just accept me for who I am?”

He stopped pacing suddenly and slumped down to the floor next to her.

She answered, “Sometimes … I think parents work so hard to keep us from making their mistakes, they won’t allow us to make our own. I mean … your mother loves you and wants the best for you. Anyone can see that. But she doesn’t know how to say it, except … to push.”

“Can you really see it? I don’t.”

“Watch her expression.”

“I don’t … I don’t read expressions very well. They tried to teach me. My mother used to take me to social skills classes and teachers. They’d show me pictures with little round stick figure faces, and I had to say what the expression was. This person is happy. This person is sad. But those were not real people. I look at real people, and I’ve got no idea what they think. What do you see?”

She turned to him, her expression somber. “I think your mother may be the saddest person I’ve ever seen.”

He stared at the floor, and I could see the anger in his posture—his shoulders were hunched and his hands bunched into fists. “Because of me.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Julia replied. “There’s something else there. Yeah, tonight made her sad … it broke her heart. But, there’s something else, and I don’t know what it is.”

“You understand people,” he said.

“Yes and no,” she said and then sighed. “I’ve been … we used to move all the time. Every three years, off to another country, another school, another life. And as the years went by, I got more and more isolated; it was harder and harder to make friends. I had to learn to read people pretty quickly. But when I started high school, I thought that was over.”

“What happened?” he asked.

She closed her eyes and leaned her head against her knees. Then she said, “You have to promise not to tell anyone what I say. None of it. Especially Crank.”

He blinked. Sean didn’t make promises easily, because he knew how painful it was to have them broken. He thought about it, then said, “I promise.”

She looked up and smiled weakly, but it wasn’t a real smile, because a couple of tears were running down her face. “I don’t talk about this much. But when I was fourteen, we moved to China. I went to this fantastic school there, where all the diplomatic kids from England and Australia and the US went. And I met this boy. He was a lot older than me. He was a senior, and I was a freshman.”

She shuddered. “I thought I was in love with him. I was stupid, and inexperienced, and terribly vulnerable. And he took advantage of all my weaknesses.”

Sean’s forehead compressed into angry ridges. “Did he rape you?”

She shook her head. “Not really. I didn’t say no. I didn’t … I didn’t do anything. He kept saying if I loved him, I should want to make him happy. And that went on for a while, but I wasn’t ready. Not in any way. It was like he … like he dominated everything I did. He’d get mad if I talked to other boys in class, and one time he squeezed my arm so hard it left bruises. I was afraid of him. And then … I got pregnant.”

Sean was openmouthed. And I knew I should walk away, I should not be listening to this conversation, especially after she’d made him promise not to tell me about it. But I’m ashamed to say I stayed. I wanted to know about her. I wanted to know everything about her.

“So, right before Christmas, he took me … somewhere in Beijing. It’s a huge city. Unbelievably huge. I was lost. There was a doctor there, and no one spoke English. I didn’t even fully understand what was going on. So while I was in the exam room, having my insides scraped out by some doctor, he left.”

She looked bleak as she spoke the words. I didn’t know what to think, except that if I ever saw the bastard who did that to her, I’d kill him. But she kept talking, and it just got worse.